If two songs are sold on an iPhone for $1 each, one by Apple and another by [insert music sales app], the small app makes 0.70, while Apple makes 1.30. Lets say each has to pay 0.50 to the label for the sale. The small app profits 0.20 while Apple profits 0.80. That's a 4x advantage for essentially the same purchase.
Unless you mean that you could have made a competitor, but that's inane -- that's a completely different market, with huge barrier to entry.
Apple is using its huge market position in one area (smartphone OSes) to give itself a huge advantage in another (music apps). That's the sort of thing companies have got huge fines for in the past, or were broken in parts for.
And at some point you could jailbreak iPhone and iPod Touch and crack apps but no real alternative market rose up
In fact, it's worse. Payment & fraud disputes are also bound to the marketplace. What are the chances that app devs will end up being the ones eating big losses just to continue to exist?
Also, when a smaller company does somehow manage to get known in the industry, it's usually under pressure to raise money or be acquired in order to compete with some other huge competitor.
I think this is mostly a regulatory fail in letting some companies grow so large and acquire smaller players. I think past a certain point, they shouldn't be allowed to do it. Finding out what that point is might be a little difficult, but probably not impossible.
Do you mean WhatsApp? I think they "only" paid $1 billion for Instagram.
This scales down to small things like parking lots. Real estate guys will buy and operate little surface lots at a loss for years to deny competitors the ability to develop properties that compete with them.
Right, but IBM used to comprise almost the entire hardware and software market. Over time, they failed to consistently deliver the best experiences to consumers and clients, so they definitely declined from their glory days. I understand your comparison about real estate developers, but I don't think it applies here. IBM can buy competitors, but if they can't make sure their acquisitions remain the best in the market, then the acquisition loses profitability, or even becomes a writeoff.
As an anecdote, I used to work on one of their analytics products, which they acquired in one of their biggest acquisitions ever. Nevertheless, we were competing for clients with smaller, leaner, and sometimes better teams in the same field. We had no inherent advantage in development over our competitors either. Sure, IBM could always buy them, but then they'd have another x billion dollar investment to turn around, and still no way to stop new competitors from taking the clients, other than creating the best product - which would be net beneficial for society anyway. In many cases though, IBM's attempts to exert control by acquiring other companies backfired because they failed to provide client value, and the company has had to write off a lot of losses by trying.
Im not comfortable with the edge places like facebook, google and reddit have over other companies, knowing what they know about with loosely named propietary data.
Im not too concerned with them buying companies: microsoft used to do that and didnt stop any of these.